1. Describe Freud’s family background. Described the composition of his family.

What do
you think was it like for Freud growing up his family?

His family life was unusual, and somewhat complicated. His father, Jakob Freud,
was 40 years old when he married Freud’s mother, Amalia Nathanson. She was 20 years
younger than Jakob Freud, and several years younger than Jakob’s son, Emanuel, from an
earlier marriage. One of Freud’s first friends was a nephew who was a year older than
Freud!
Jakob Freud was never particularly successful in business. The industrial
importance of Freiberg was declining, so the young family left and eventually settled in
Vienna, Austria (Jakob’s sons from his first marriage, Emanuel and Philipp, emigrated to
England). At this point Jakob and Amalia Freud had two children, Sigmund and his sister
Anna (a brother born between them, Julius, died at 7 or 8 months of age). Shortly after
arriving in Vienna, however, they had five more children during the years 1860-1866:
Rosa, Marie, Adolfine, Pauline, and Alexander. This resulted in continued financial
difficulties, which appears to have been painful for the young Freud (Gay, 1998). There
were also personal difficulties that made it difficult for Freud to enjoy a close relationship
with his father. Jakob Freud once told his son a story about being abused by an Austrian
Christian, a man who knocked Jakob Freud’s hat into the muddy street and then ordered
the “Jew” to get off the sidewalk.
2. From the Module on Freud’s Psychoanalytical, I learned that our personality develops
from the interactions among what he proposed as the three fundamental structures of the
human mind: the id, ego, and superego. Conflicts among these three structures, and our
efforts to find balance among what each of them “desires,” determines how we behave
and approach the world. What balance we strike in any given situation determines how
we will resolve the conflict between two overarching behavioral tendencies: our
biological aggressive and pleasure-seeking drives vs. our socialized internal control over
those drives.

And I also learned that the id, ego, and superego are in constant conflict and that adult
personality and behavior are rooted in the results of these internal struggles throughout
childhood. He believed that a person who has a strong ego has a healthy personality and
that imbalances in this system can lead to neurosis (what we now think of as anxiety and
depression) and unhealthy behaviors. That the nature of the conflicts among the id, ego,
and superego change over time as a person grows from child to adult. Specifically, he
maintained that these conflicts progress through a series of five basic stages, each with a
different focus: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. He called his idea the
psychosexual theory of development, with each psychosexual stage directly related to a
different physical center of pleasure.